When to use community management and/or social media approaches in the social intranet (aka “enterprise 2.0”)

When reading this post today I tried to apply the same considerations to social intranet and I found this could make sense and be usefull.

Just replace “brand” with “company” and “people / persons / users ” with “employees” in the following:

…For most (not all) Social Media professionals, they “win” if they maintain a conversation with every person who touches a brand to personalize that brand and create an engaged audience.

For most (again, not all) Community Managers, they “win” if they put themselves out of a job because their users are talking to each other (not just to the community manager), evangelizing the brand and defending itself to the point that the Community Manager is no longer needed.

I’m a visual person, so for people like me, this is Social Media – people talking with the brand:

And this is Community Management – people talking with each other:

(Don’t know where they “borrowed” these pictures from, but I “borrowed” them from here and here, respectively)

The metrics for both are different. The goals for both are different. The tools for both are different. The success factors are different. So why on earth do we keep calling them the same thing?

…..

If your job is primarily to talk to lots of people, you work in Social Media

If your job is primarily to get lots of people talking to each other, you work in Community Management.

You may not actually be a Community Manager – and that’s ok. « The Community Manager